33. Monitor number of visits sent from search over time for top keywords. This may help flag drops in rankings.

34. Compare conversion rates of first time vs. returning visitors. Expect to see higher conversion rates for returning visitors.

35. Focus on boosting keywords currently ranking on page 2 results. Just a few more links, or on-page optimization, will likely bump you to page 1, which will mean lots more traffic.

36. GA gives you 20 goals--use ‘em! Create micro conversions for things like time spent on site, newsletter sign-ups, shares, tweets, etc. Do your best to assign unique values to these actions.

37. Fix GA’s latent last-click attribution bias (meaning the last click before the conversion gets the credit) by (at least) also measuring the first touch point. Here are instructions for setting up first touch tracking in GA.

Again, hats off to Rand! Lots of folks clearly learned lots of great info that they’re already applying today. And keep an eye on the SEO talent in Bulgaria. It can make people happy enough to do handstands!

Thanks for the useful takeaways, Paris! Great recap of the 3-hour long advanced SEO master class from the Wizzard of Mozz himself. I hope this article gets promoted to the blog section so even more SEOs can read it. I admire the editor's choice to publish any materials about recent SEOmoz training and events for the sake of those readers unable to attend in person.

Thanks, Paris. I tried to look at those Sharenet PPT slides but didn't get far. It wasn't just the quantity. It's that PPT is designed to go with audio narration. And when that's not included, the info on the deck can be pretty flat.

Thanks for the useful takeaways Paris. Rand certainly does like talking about what he knows.

User-generated content is interesting since I've recently seen some software that will do this. And thanks for clarifying number 5. It's a point I need to focus on more during my link building and assessing OSE and Linkscape.

Aggregating & summarizing interesting content usually provides value which gets rewarded by search engines (as I attempted to do with this post). But w/ Tweet round-ups, I think the main benefit comes via blog/domain authority rather than page indexation. If users enjoy these round-ups and like/share/tweet them, return more often expecting them, etc., these actions send positive signals which should lift the blog domain's authority, and it's ability to better rank other pages on the domain. However, the ranking potential of the individual round-up post pages could be low, as topics (and keywords) are likely spread wide but not too deep, so not keyword-focused and hard to rank. Separately, they could also be a nice component to a weekly newsletter to your subscriber list.

Sure. It means that the number of unique root domains linking to a site has a stronger correlation (i.e. is a better predictor) with ranking higher on search than having the exact keywords (non-hyphenated) in your domain name.